Thoughts on Experimentation

Questions and Comments
#1

was just thinking about this:

If I am blind or have no eyes, and I run a subliminal that is designed to improve one’s skills as a visual artist or to bring one to an amazing level of accuracy in marksmanship, then I can’t look at my results and then say ‘man! what a fake! This subliminal did not work.’

By reason, in other words, the results that we get from a particular subliminal program must be shaped, influenced, and/or limited (at least minimally) by the personal characteristics that we bring to the table.

BUT, AT THE SAME TIME…

If I am blind and I run that visual artistry or marksmanship subliminal, there is also a pretty major chance that I may discover some hidden expressions or applications of that program that may have been overlooked or missed by other people who are running it in more conventional contexts. Those hidden expressions may be intuitive or they may be utterly surprising. (e.g., I may suddenly find that my strategic thinking has leapt to a higher level.)

This is what I’m thinking about with regard to the spirit of experimentation.

Every supposed limitation represents a potential opportunity to discover something new about a program. You can bemoan the fact that you’re not having the exact experience that someone else crowed and celebrated about or you can listen with a mind that is open to the potential developments hidden within your own experience.

This is kind of how I feel with my Mind’s Eye experience. But I guess it probably happens to various people with various programs all the time.

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#2

For almost every task in the world, one needs more than just eyes to accomplish.

The visual artist may not have been able to see his improved artwork, but he can be told by other people that his artwork has seen an improvement, or be able to feel the texture of his artwork.

Ditto for the marksman.

After all, wasn’t Beethoven deaf?

Anyway, I am rerminded of all the blind swordsmen in Asian martial arts fiction, who could fight off their enemies by analyzing the type and direction of sounds they heard.

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#4

Beethoven learned to compose before losing his hearing, and was also a genius.

It is basically impossible that he’d have composed those pieces under the limitations of congenital deafness. BUT he’d still have been a genius (I think), so it would very likely have been expressed in some other way.

Limitations are real. There’s no shame in them.

The blind swordsman character is also pretty fanciful. It’s probably (like Beethoven) based on people who were highly skilled and lost (some of) their sight after having developed to a high-level. Of course, there have been some pretty incredible examples of people who have found alternative strategies for performing at a high-level in spite of some sensory impairment. (There are literally human beings using echo-location right now for example to ride bicycles with great skill. No crashes. This is a true story, not a legend.)

But I was specifically trying to propose examples where there was a true, real, unalterable limitation. Even that kind of limitation can be a potential avenue to alternate discoveries.

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